[GS] Which speed do you feel is harder?

[Victoria]

I have only played about 5 Marathon games and 5 online games often not to completion so my experience is very limited but I am interested to see what people feel even if they have just say played epic and standard which of the 2 is harder and easier and why.
Weirdly I am finding I prefer standard for difficulty but putting my finger on exactly why is hard because I do not have enough knowledge.
I do know if I do not have enough units on Marathon I can get seriously rolled and barbs are quite a pain and XP is harder to get.
Standard seems to have the hardest golden age but it is just a feeling, what are the statistics?
Online is so fast, much planning you get wrong can be punished hard but you can build units very fast and barbs are just less of a pain.

 

[Beaver79]

- There are 2 downsides to slower starts. Early scouting and early rushes. On marathon it takes something like 15 turns to get out a scout and on online it takes 3 or so. Since the AI starts out with more units and cities on higher difficulties it will get more goody huts and city states compared to faster starts. 15 turns is a long head start. I usually play on epic and almost every game I get surprised war declared since it takes so long to get out a unit. I always go warrior first as well. On online speed you will have a couple units out by the time the AI finds you and they won't see you as the same pushover.

- War is much easier on slower speeds though. If you are approaching a city and kill the AIs archer, you can take your time surrounding it and whittle it down. On online speed you kill that archer and a new one pops up next turn. They could do the same to your city, but humans lose far less units than the AI does.

Good point on the barbs though. They spawn 1 unit per turn so they are more of a pain on slower speeds.

I'd have to vote online as the hardest, but I don't care. I want my game to last a couple days instead of a couple hours.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Slower speeds have always been considered easier in Civ. On the Civ 4 forums, nobody even took anything but normal speed/no huts/no events games seriously. (If you think anyone is elitist here, you have no idea)


The AI is bad at war but faster at tech because of bonuses so fast speeds benefit them. They can just pull advanced armies out of nowhere. On slower speeds, your units move faster relative to the tech and build speeds so they have more chance of doing damage.

On a more basic level, the AI is bad in general. More turns for them means more mistakes. You could argue that slower speeds benefit the better player and thus the AI is even more hopeless.

Barbs are a problem on slower speeds, but that's a result of Firaxis simply not giving a damn about them (almost nothing else is adjusted to them, like eras, peace treaties, etc)

 

[tetley]

(If you think anyone is elitist here, you have no idea)

LOL I had an incident at work, in development. I said that work had religious wars, over which language was best to base our infrastructure on. This one manager said, "I'm not religious. It's just that anyone who doesn't know Python is the best language is an inferior coder." And he was dead serious. Clueless, yes. Elitist as the Waffen SS, yes. But dead serious.

 

[Jeppetto]

LOL I had an incident at work, in development. I said that work had religious wars, over which language was best to base our infrastructure on. This one manager said, "I'm not religious. It's just that anyone who doesn't know Python is the best language is an inferior coder." And he was dead serious. Clueless, yes. Elitist as the Waffen SS, yes. But dead serious.

He wasn't an elitist. He was Python Supremacist.
Long live the king of ez codes.

 

[Victoria]

Long live the king of ez codes.

My Brother programs chips, said to me once binary is god but have you ever thought how boring it would be conversing with god.

 

[Sostratus]

Slower speeds have always been considered easier in Civ.

I remember when they added marathon mode in, what Civ4:Warlords or BTS? They intentionally had costs go to ~3x for buildings but only 2x for units (or something like that.) part of the reason is that unit speed doesn't change, so the slower speeds make units tactically a lot more impactful. My guess is that this is a human advantage so long as you can handle the initial start of deity, where you have a lot less research and development time before the flood of warriors can come mug your capital. But once you have archers etc it's just gonna be much more one sided.

said to me once binary is god but have you ever thought how boring it would be conversing with god.

When I had to learn binary/assembly, they made sure to drill into us that we would suffer so that in the future, we would appreciate what we have today.
It's a real shame modern programming has gotten so lazy with things like memory management and general optimization because modern hardware is so capable.

 

[Lily_Lancer]

I don't think the "difficulty" varies since the winning rate for me is always 100%.

If you look at which year we wins, then certainly online speed wins on later years.

For marathon you just try to pillage every tile of your neighbor with scouts, then with horseman after they wall up. You can capture but remember pillaging yields much more than owning a city so you'd better let it flip and pillage the tiles again. Do not forget to fix those tiles before the city flips.

I only played one marathon game, as Norway, and achieved SV before Christ.

 

[Pietato]

Barbs spawning at the same rate no matter the speed makes Marathon more painful. Online also amplifies the good and the bad moves you make, which means if you know what you are doing, it is easier.

 

[Victoria]

Online you get XP so fast.

 

[tetley]

My Brother programs chips, said to me once binary is god but have you ever thought how boring it would be conversing with god.

In that case, if your brother does what I think he does, then I suggest the Xilinx Pynq boards. www.pynq.io . And if he doesn't use them, then he is just an inferior FPGA programmer, not elitist like us.

 

[Basajaun]

Im with Beaver79 here. Having played almost all combinations of speed, map and difficulty.

I usually play on Epic speed/King difficulty, and standard continents, but Ive just begun to play some terra maps, and Ive been trying to play one on Epic speed as Gilgamesh...From 5 games today, 4 I was swept under the rug before turn 20-25.

The combination of having less starting land (because of terra map) and slower speed, all I could manage was finish building the warcart while they are already hitting my capital, or build a warrior, and last 2 turns more because of the bodyblock.

The Maori Deity Terra game was a breeze tho. Even with Korea on the starting continent. Tough with a lot of barb spawns and she basically entering medieval before I finished ancient, but doable still. I managed to grab a religion, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and with some maraes I had enough faith to catch up buying Science buildings.

The difficult part of higher difficulties in my opinion, is overcoming the initial AI advantage. Its easier on faster speeds because you can build something before the AI (or the barbs) gets to you. Once that point is over, slower speeds make the game easier, because as mentioned before, we micro-manage better than the ai, while in quicker speeds its easy to get distracted by low turn count units/buildings, and mess up your efficiency while AI catches up again thanks to their bonuses.

 

[Victoria]

if your brother does what I think he does,

Lol. He has a heli mountainbiking business he owns now, that has always been his passion. He is a bit of a polymath TBH, self taught electronics from about the age of 6. To him fixing bugs in eft pos machines and money dispensers was a way to his dreams...I doubt he cares about being called inferior, as he says, he is often on top of the world... sorry, off topic.

 

[Deadly Dog]

I voted standard because of the two speeds I play, epic and standard, I much prefer epic, for the two difficulty levels I play at which are immortal and emperor. I know I win mostly by exploring first and using tactics on the map, so it seemed obvious to me that slower speeds would be an advantage.

I became a career epic speed player in civ 5 when I felt that I just couldn't implement unique units and enjoy a long glorious campaign with them before they went obsolete.

Civ VI June update did a lot to make epic speed harder for me. First was fixing the barbs and making them smarter. Then adjusting era score thresholds so that classical GA wasn't guaranteed. And the higher xp needed for promotions has always made it harder against barbarians.

Overall it has to still be an easier game if you have more time to explore and mess with the AI on the map, just runs the danger of being tedious and now you have what I think is an extremely perilous ancient era if you play on epic, and I assume marathon. Assuming we're playing high difficulty settings, that is.

 

[Sukayo]

Marathon, as errors take so long to get corrected ... It gets easy when every turn is full with right decisions.

 

[shaglio]

Marathon, as errors take so long to get corrected ... It gets easy when every turn is full with right decisions.

I would think the complete opposite. There are 1500 maximum turns on Marathon, while there's only (i think) 150 maximum turns on Online. That's a factor of 10x as many turns. Therefore, a mistake for merely 1 turn on Online would be the equivalent of making the same mistake on Marathon for 10 turns. Thus a 1 turn mistake on Marathon is easier to recover from.

Although, it's been a while since I played Online speed, so the turn number might be incorrect.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I don't think the "difficulty" varies since the winning rate for me is always 100%.

Are you saying you won every single Deity Civ VI game you ever played?
Does this hold true for Civ V and Civ IV in your experience??

 

[Lily_Lancer]

Are you saying you won every single Deity Civ VI game you ever played?
Does this hold true for Civ V and Civ IV in your experience??

For Civ V yes.
For Civ IV no, there exists a lot of really difficult situations.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

For Civ V yes.
For Civ IV no, there exists a lot of really difficult situations.

Impressive!
I remember when they did a Fall Patch for Civ V and the AI was on steroids.
Carpets of Doom would show up like nothing before and wipe me out.
They had to Nerf that AI Aggression.
During those months I didn't see too many Lets Plays lol.

I still can get rolled on Civ VI if I get greedy.
I might also rage quit if I am at war with a bunch of Horse Barbs, Swords and a Neighboring AI.

On topic though, I play Standard.
Anything above is too long for me and anything earlier is too quick unless it is Multiplayer of course.

 

[lotrmith]

I would think the complete opposite. There are 1500 maximum turns on Marathon, while there's only (i think) 150 maximum turns on Online. That's a factor of 10x as many turns. Therefore, a mistake for merely 1 turn on Online would be the equivalent of making the same mistake on Marathon for 10 turns. Thus a 1 turn mistake on Marathon is easier to recover from.

Although, it's been a while since I played Online speed, so the turn number might be incorrect.

This is true and correct for, say, working the wrong tile for one turn, or moving the wrong direction with a unit once.

But the opposite is true when you, for example, don't change to the correct policy card and thus have to wait many more turns to be able to change it out, or if your mistake ends up with a dead unit that takes many more turns to replace.